Todo List Quest: Recurring Tasks

Recurring tasks have been one of the items on my todo list criteria since the beginning. I think that is one of the main benefits of having electronic todo lists, is the ability to make tasks reappear periodically. There are some things I want to do everyday, some things I want to do once a month, and some things I want to do on a specific day every year.

In the old days of paper planners and todo lists these tasks always had to be rewritten manually every time they needed to be done. That meant that when you finished a task you did every month you would have to go write it down on the calendar for the next month or put it in the tickler folder.

That is exactly what GTD would suggest doing, and I suppose it worked fine. Now there is a faster and easier way though with recurring or repeating reminders. You don't have to go write it down all over again, you just set it an forget about it until you are reminded on the proper day.



This aught to be one of the most important features in any todo list app since it is one of the clear advantages of using electronic over paper todo lists, but unfortunately it is absent in many apps including Gneo.

So, why would I choose to be using an app that misses one of the most important features? The simple answer is that I didn't know it was missing it at first. Gneo has a feature called repeating reminders, which I thought was the same thing. It is not, repeating reminders just means that you can be reminded of a task repeatedly until it is done, but the task will not regenerate at certain times.

I haven't completely given up on Gneo for two reasons. First I had already set everything up it Gneo before I discovered this. It turns out a lot of other people were confused by it as well, so I don't feel so bad. But having to reset everything up in another app will be a lot of work, and I don't have another one that I feel motivated to do that on yet.

Secondly Gneo has indicated in a tweet that they have a big summer update coming, which they hinted may solve the problem. So, I am holding out.

Gneo isn't the only list that doesn't support recurring tasks, if you go down the comparison chart you will see a whole bunch that don't. It is just the only one that fooled me, so far.

Even when you get recurring reminders in an app though they are seldom done well. For example in IQTELL recurring tasks reappear as soon as you complete the task, so even if you do not want to do the task until next year it appears on the list now, with a due date of next year. I want the task to just stay invisible until the time I want it to appear.

If you would please let me know what you use for recurring tasks I would greatly appreciate it. Leave a comment below or tweet your answer to me @halduauthor. Thanks for reading. And remember, live better.